Police Board: Stress and bad legal advice led to discrepancies in cop’s shooting story

Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune

General counsel Charise Valente and police Superintendent Eddie Johnson attend a Chicago Police Board meeting at CPD headquarters on June 14, 2018. The board voted not to fire officer Raoul Mosqueda during the meeting.

The Chicago Police Board found that stress and long work hours led a Chicago police officer to make “factually inaccurate or misleading” sworn statements about the fatal shooting of a motorist in 2011, according to a decision released Friday.

The board also said that Officer Raoul Mosqueda was prepared poorly by his city attorney for a deposition in a lawsuit related to the shooting, leading to discrepancies in his statements. On Thursday, the eight-member board voted unanimously to clear Mosqueda of allegations that he lied, allowing him to return to full duty and receive back pay.

The board’s vote came more than a year after the city’s former police watchdog agency, the Independent Police Review Authority, recommended that Mosqueda be fired for lying about the shooting in three separate sworn statements. The city eventually settled a lawsuit brought by Darius Pinex’s family for about $3.5 million.

Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson agreed with IPRA’s decision, contending Mosqueda lied to justify pulling over 27-year-old Pinex. Mosqueda, who was promoted to the rank of field training officer days before IPRA recommended his firing, has been suspended without pay since Johnson moved to fire him last August.

Mosqueda could not be reached for comment.

Pinex’s mother, Gloria Pinex, slammed the board’s decision.

“I sat through (a) deposition and listened to him lie,” she said in a brief telephone interview Friday afternoon. “This is a slap in the face. Total disrespect.”

In January 2011, Mosqueda and his partner, Gildardo Sierra, boxed in the car driven by Pinex in the South Side’s Englewood community, and exited their squad car with guns drawn. The officers alleged Pinex, who had a history of drug arrests, refused orders and threw the vehicle in reverse, hitting a light pole and then gunning the car forward. Mosqueda fatally shot Pinex in the head, though Sierra also fired, records show. Investigators found a gun beneath the driver’s seat of Pinex’s car, police reports showed.

Hours after the shooting, Mosqueda told an IPRA investigator that he and Sierra stopped the car because they heard a police dispatch saying it was involved in an earlier shooting. At the trial over the Pinex family’s lawsuit, however, a recording emerged that didn’t offer specifics of the Oldsmobile Aurora driven by Pinex, and didn’t mention a shooting.

In a 2013 deposition, Mosqueda offered details about what he heard over the police radio — details that differed from his 2011 interview with IPRA.

While prepping him for the deposition, an attorney from the city’s Law Department, Tom Aumann, had Mosqueda listen to a different dispatch recording that mentioned an Oldsmobile Aurora possibly involved in a crime, according to the Police Board’s report. The report doesn’t indicate why Aumann, who is no longer with the Law Department, played a different recording. A Law Department spokesman had no comment about why Aumann prepared Mosqueda by playing a different dispatch recording.

Chicago Police Department radio traffic from the night Darius Pinex was shot and killed following a traffic stop in the Englewood neighborhood by Officers Raoul Mosqueda and Gildardo Sierra in January 2011.

Chicago Police Department radio traffic from the night Darius Pinex was shot and killed following a traffic stop in the Englewood neighborhood by Officers Raoul Mosqueda and Gildardo Sierra in January 2011.

In clearing Mosqueda, the Police Board considered the fact that he had worked nearly 40 hours straight before giving IPRA his initial statement about the shooting. On his previous shift, Mosqueda worked several hours of overtime on an armed robbery arrest, the board said.

“He had been through a highly stressful situation of being knocked down by a car and fatally shooting Mr. Pinex could have caused him to mistakenly include details within his statement,” the board wrote in its 20-page report.

While the Pinex family’s lawsuit was playing out in court, another attorney with the Law Department resigned after a federal judge found he intentionally concealed the recordings from the family’s lawyers. A Tribune investigation in 2016 detailed how the Law Department has routinely failed to turn over potential evidence in police misconduct lawsuits.

The Pinex shooting was also the first of three involving Sierra, Mosqueda’s partner, in less than six months in 2011. In 2016, IPRA ruled another fatal shooting involving Sierra was unjustified. Prosecutors looked into at least one of the shootings, but Sierra was never criminally charged. He resigned from the Police Department in 2015.